Melinda Gates: A Catholic puts 'reputation' on the line for family planning

BY JOEL CONNELLY, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Published 8:31 am, Sunday, July 15, 2012

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Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and Melinda Gates, co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talk during the London Summit on Family Planning organised by the UK Government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and Melinda Gates, co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talk during the London Summit on Family Planning organised by the UK Government and

Melinda Gates, left, and husband Bill Gates wait to speak at the opening reception of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Thursday, June 2, 2011, in Seattle. Back from a family planning summit in London, Melinda Gates quips: "Bill is the lead on polio. I'm the lead on maternity and child health."

Melinda Gates, left, and husband Bill Gates wait to speak at the opening reception of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Thursday, June 2, 2011, in Seattle. Back from a family planning summit in London,

Melinda Gates, a practicing Catholic, has made contraception her life's cause. "I believe aboslutely in family planning: I am putting my reputation, my credibility on the line for it," she says after London summit raises $26 billion.

The co-founders and co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is spearheading effort to make contraception available to 120 million women in the developing world by 2020.

The co-founders and co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is spearheading effort to make contraception available to 120 million women in the developing world by 2020.

Photo: AP

Melinda Gates: A Catholic puts 'reputation' on the line for family planning

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Melinda Gates "hung out" by a well in a West African village last week talking with women about family planning. The co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a practicing Catholic, is going to the well to make contraception available to millions of women acrss the developing world.

"I believe absolutely in family planning: I am putting my reputation, my credibility on the line for it," Gates told a Saturday night awards ceremony in Seattle. It honored innovative projects designed to prevent the deaths of women in childbirth, and deaths of children soon after they are born.

Gates started at the well in Senegal and Niger, countries with the world's highest fertility rates, and ended up keeping company in London with Great Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron.

The Gates Foundation and the British government co-hosted a population conference that set out to raise $2.3 billion and ended up getting cash and pledges of $2.6 billion ($560 million of it from the Gates Foundation) to support family planning in the developing world. The aim is to expand availability of contraception to 120 million new women by 2020.

The drive behind the commitment was explained, in presentations to innovators and later at a program at McCaw Hall. Gates spoke along with activists from such allied groups as the U.S. Agency for International Development, Britain's Dept. of Internation Development and Grand Challenges of Canada.

Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy.

"It is amazing to think that in the 72-hour period around the time of birth, 150,000 women will die this year: In that same 72-hour window, 1.6 million children are going to die -- nearly one fourth of the world's deaths of children under five," said Dr. Peter Singer of Grand Challenges Canada.

Melinda Gates feels that contraceptives should not be controversial. She notes surveys showing that 82 percent of American Catholics approve of their use. The Church hierarchy says no to the pill. Dioceses have sued the Obama administration for insisting on birth control coverage in health plans offered to religiously affiliated colleges and universities. Ex-Sen. Rick Santorum, in his presidential campaign, argued that the pill produces promiscuity.

"It's something we all use: We use them so readily in our society," Gates said Saturday.

In Britain, talking to The Guardian, Gates said:

"Of course I wrestled with this. As a Catholic I believe in this religion. There are amazing things about this religion, amazing moral teachings that I do believe in, but I also have to think about how we keep women alive. I believe in not letting women die. I believe in not letting babies die, and to me that's more important than arguing about what method of contraception (is right)."

The Ursuline Academy in Dallas, whose sisters educated Gates, have issued a statement saying the are "proud of Melinda French Gates, her dedication to social justice, her compassion for the undeserving."

But Matthew Hanley, writing in Britain's Catholic Herald, alleged: "Artificial contraception, by virtue of the resulting collapse of marriage, has had an improverishing effect (in the developed world) even if the affluent consider it a routine accessory." It should not be foisted on poor nations, he argued.

Melinda Gates, on Saturday, joked about the division of labor between the founders and co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Bill is the lead on polio, I'm the lead on maternal and child health," she said. The couple "push each other", Gates joked, and Bill Gates was the first person with whom she shared impressions and findings after the trip to West Africa and Britain.

On trips to Africa, reported Gates, she has been "shocked at how many people knew about contraceptives, and how many are demanding them." She talked of a family in Niger, an impoverished couple and seven children living in two rooms, and hearing from the mother: "If I had known, I would have had three children."

The theme in the past week, at the Seattle campus of the Gates Foundation, has been to look for bottom-up rather than top-down solutions. A total of 500 submissiones were winnowed down to the 65 "most promising projects" which were invited to Seattle to show their wares. A dozen winners were chosen for $250,000 seed grants and $2 million transition grants.

As an example, the Uganda-based African Medical Research Foundation received a $2 million grant. The money will be used to provide a WE CARE Solar Suitcase to 200 health center, offering health workers a sustainable source of power to provide life-saving interventions 24 hours a day.

The Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology in Health won a $250,000 grant for an innovative test designed to determine if a pregnant woman is likely to develop diabetes, and to counsel high-risk women on diet and exercise and additional care during delivery.

The competition, with entries all over the world -- and support for it -- has wowed local champions of global health.

"It's amazing to have a city and a region rally around a cause such as this . . . There is not another city in the world that has rallied around this," said Lisa Cohen of the Washington Global Health Alliance.

When the Gates Foundation dedicated its new Seattle campus, just west of the Seattle Center, Melinda Gates made a point of saying that the world's largest philanthropic organization was anchoring its roots here. She added that it is always a pleasure to fly back to Seattle after being on the road or at the well.

She said Saturday night that "there is a huge body of work to do" in maternity and child care, but noted progress. When Gates was born, 20 million children under the age of 5 died each year. The figure is now down to 7.5 million.

"Things are getting better around the world," she said, "(but) they are not getting better fast enough."

Gates was even a little wide-eyed at the $2.6 billion pledged and raised in London. "It is the first time serious resources were raised -- for women," she said.

And results are expected -- quickly. When women in developing nations do get access to contraception and information on family planning, added Melinda Gates, "you get change in a generation."